her
wounds under a coat of mail, rather than a dead thing in
mummy-wrappings, in cotton-wool.

But the doctor's letter generated hope. She respected the doctor's
opinion. For him to be enthusiastic about anyone was very wonderful;
there was something wistful and very beautiful in this deferring of an
old man to one much younger, something very touching in his frank pride
in the big man's friendliness. Always Kraill had been a hero to her,
since the days when his cynical early book of lectures had come like
revelation to her, even though she had had to take the help of a
dictionary on every line. That evening Louis went off to the township
after three days' restless nerviness on his part, and three nights'
valiant love-making on hers. Taking young Andrew she went down by the
lake and leaving him to splash joyously in the ripples at the edge, she
read the last lectures.

She read for an hour, gorging the book as a child gobbling sweets before
his nurse's return. She was devouring understanding--it seemed to her
that the lectures were being written expressly for her. It seemed, with
one half of Kraill's wisdom she could save Louis. The child got hungry
and she fetched milk and biscuit for him. His crawler was soaked by the
water in which he lived half his life. She changed it in a dream and
took him back to the lake again, where the shadows were getting long and
cool. It was possible to think with detachment there, in the serenity of
the evening.

She saw, as she usually saw things, very clear and stark, that all
through she had been wrong about Louis. Once only she had come within
touching distance of the right, when on the _Oriana_ she had told him
that his only hope was to throw up the sponge, as people
say--acknowledge himself beat to the earth as Saul of Tarsus had done on
the Damascus Road. Andrew Lashcairn had done it that night with the
little pale cousin; he had made himself "at one with God": fighting and
struggling had ceased; his life, a battle-ground of warring forces, had
become, in a mighty flash of understanding, the chamber of a peace
treaty, and God--a big man--God outside himself--had taken hold of him
and kept him. To Louis that could never happen; he was too unloving, too
self-centred, too unimaginative ever to see lights from heaven. Indeed,
she thought hopefully, Louis might, in the end, go further than Andrew.
He might stand up in the strength of a man without the propping of a God
at all.

"